THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 19, 2016 87
of the Irish writer Emma Donoghue's
new novel, "The Wonder" (Little,
Brown), thinks of the claim that eleven-
year-old Anna O'Donnell has been liv-
ing without food for a full four months.
Donoghue drew her inspiration from
the Jacob case, but she has set her story
a decade earlier, in the late eighteen-
fifties, and moved it from the farmland
of western Wales to the peat bogs of
the Irish midlands, seven years after the
end of the Great Famine. The month
is August---"the hungry season," Lib is
informed, before the potato harvest
comes in. A serious, sharp-tempered
widow of twenty-nine, Lib is disdain-
ful of most things where the Irish are
concerned. Having served in Crimea
under the great Florence Nightingale,
she is a skeptic by temperament and by
training, a woman of science commit-
ted to the rule of empirical evidence,
and none too pleased to find that the
gig she has left her London hospital job
for doesn't involve caring for a sick pa-
tient. Instead, a committee of promi-
nent local men, hoping to prove that
the fasting O'Donnell girl is indeed mi-
raculous, has hired her, along with a nun,
to act as a "nursemaid-cum-gaolor," as
Lib puts it, working in shifts to keep
watch over Anna and, at the end of two
weeks, report their findings.
English snobbery versus Irish tradi-
tion, science versus faith, a single woman
versus a powerful male cohort: condi-
tions could hardly be better for breed-
ing dramatic antagonism, and Lib has
no trouble racking up nemeses from the
stock cast of small-village types she finds
herself thrust among. There's the phy-
sician presiding over the case, who be-
lieves that Anna may be converting
sunlight into energy, like a plant, or de-
veloping a reptilian metabolism, and the
local priest, whose murmurings on sin
and penance are repulsive to Lib's un-
religious mind. Anna's father is too dolt-
ish to doubt his daughter; her mother,
as crafty as her husband is simple, so-
licitous of gift-bearing guests and sour
toward prying Lib, is the kind to know
more than she lets on.
But Lib's chief adversary is Anna
herself. She's convinced that the girl
is lying; her face, when Lib first sees
it, is full, "chubby," even. How to weigh
this proof of deception against the girl's
air of innocence? If Anna isn't a saint
yet, she makes a strong case for her
own canonization. Confined under the
watch to her small bedroom, with an
occasional stroll outdoors, she is in-
variably cheerful. She doesn't grow
restless or shy while Lib asks her to
undress to examine her body, and she
doesn't complain as the days stretch
on, the monotonous chain of hours
unbroken by mealtimes. What she does
is pray, murmuring hymns to herself
or calling out verses as the family kneels
to say Hail Marys by the hearth out-
side her door. She recites one prayer,
a benediction to keep souls out of pur-
gatory, thirty-three times a day, one
for each year of Jesus' life. The girl is
so pious she won't even cop to having
a favorite saint. "They all have di er-
ent things to teach us," she says, when
Lib prompts her. If there was any ques-
tion that Anna isn't a normal kid, that
preternaturally equitable answer lays
it to rest.
Donoghue, the author of more than
a dozen books, has developed something
of a specialty in putting children in sit-
uations of harrowing confinement.
"Slammerkin"( ), set in eighteenth-
century London and Wales, opens with
a sixteen-year-old girl locked up in an
airless, shit-filled cell in Monmouth
Gaol. "Frog Music" ( ), her previous
novel, features an urban "baby farm" in
eighteen-seventies San Francisco, a fetid
apartment where infants are kept to-
gether in pens, unwashed and untended,
as long as their parents can cough up
the few dollars a week required to keep
them there.
Most extreme is "Room," Donoghue's
blockbuster from , and the basis for
the Oscar-winning movie of the same
name.The room in question is an eleven-
by-eleven-foot locked, soundproofed
suburban shed where five-year-old Jack
and his mother, Ma, live as prisoners of
the man who abducted her from her col-
lege campus seven years earlier. The
novel---published two and a half years
before the discovery and arrest of Ariel
Castro, the captor of three teen-age girls
in Cleveland, whose story it anticipated
in a number of ghastly particulars---is
testament to Donoghue's imaginative
power, her ability to look open-eyed at
the sadistic terrors of such an ordeal with-
out missing its more banal aspects. You
cringe at the beep of the shed's door code
being punched in, the signal that Ma's
captor is about to enter, and you cringe,
too, if more gently, when Jack demands
that she read him the charmless picture
book "Dylan the Digger" for the ump-
teenth time.
Donoghue's ingenious move, in
"Room," was to enlist Jack as narrator.
Presented through a child's eyes, the
novel became a tale not so much of
horror and imprisonment---owing to
an extraordinary feat of self-control on
Ma's part, Jack doesn't realize that the
images he sees on the television corre-
spond to actual things that exist be-
yond the walls---but of discovery, when
Ma finally lets him in on the truth of
the outside world, with its real animals,
real plants, real roads, real buildings,
and real people.
The secret at the heart of "The Won-
der" is lodged in the inner world, not the
outer one. Once again, an adult is made
responsible for the welfare of a trapped
child, but only the child knows what
confines her. "Strange creature; she
showed no sign of resenting the watch
that had been set over her," Lib thinks.
"Behind that calm confidence, surely her
mind had to be scurrying like a mouse?"
Lib would like to imagine herself as the
cat, ready to pounce at the first sign of
weakness. Really, she and Anna are evenly
matched, locked in a contest of radically
di erent psychologies. It's obvious to Lib
that Anna must be faking, because what
child would choose to starve? She reg-
isters Anna's piety as hardly more than
a tic, ignoring her compulsive praying to
take notes on her physical condition. Her
brittle hair, falling out in sheets. Her
swollen belly and legs.The way she shiv-
ers on warm afternoons. The sour smell
of her breath.
Few signs of maturity, Lib jotted down; Anna
seemed more like eight or nine than eleven. Small-
pox vaccination on upper arm. The milk-white skin
was dry to the touch, brownish and rough in
places. Bruises on the knees, typical in children.
But those tiny spots on the girl's shins, blue-red---
Lib had never encountered them before. She no-
ticed that same ne down on the girl's forearms,
back, belly, legs; like a baby monkey. Was this
hairiness common among the Irish, by any chance?
Lib recalled cartoons in the popular press depict-
ing them as apish pygmies.
The modern reader will recognize
these as symptoms of anorexia, the means
by which the body struggles to stave o
the e ects of its own starvation. As Lib